which that book opens, and in which, in fact, it is more or less monotonously kept up throughout, serves, more particularly when viewed in connection with the known state of Arabia at the time, as a kind of retrospective index of the speculative route that must have been pursued in order to reach it. That is to say, taking the state of conviction promulgated in the Koran as the goal that was ultimately reached by Mahomet, our knowledge of human nature generally, and of the various elements and tendencies at work in Arabia at the time, ought to enable us to guess, with some certainty, by what sceptical highway that goal was arrived at.

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with the wind and the stars, and far from the bustle and the lights of Mecca.

By his marriage with Kadijah, tradition informs us, Mahomet became acquainted with an Arab, named Waraka, the nephew of Kadijah, who in the course of an erratic career had passed successively through Judaism and Christianity, without having found a resting-place in either. What influence the conversation of this man, who is said to have been well acquainted with the Old and the New Testaments, may have exerted over Mahomet, cannot be determined; it is extremely probable, however, that the contact of so restless a spirit, bringing more home to Mahomet the fact of the religious anarchy prevailing among his countrymen, may have determined him to follow out to the uttermost his own spiritual bent, with a view to arrive at a conclusion capable of being stated and promulgated. If so, and indeed whether it were so or not, the first step that he would feel it incumbent upon him to take, would be to separate himself from the idolatrous portion of his countrymen, to protest at least against that element of Arabian thought and practice. For, by whatever impulse or at whatever point, the process of mental change was begun, this, the negation, namely, of the grosser portions of Polytheism, would infallibly be its first considerable result. In the following passage of the Koran, where Mahomet narrates with evident delight an old legend of Abraham's revolt from the faith of his idolatrous forefathers, he may be supposed to picture retrospectively his own state of mind at this crisis of his change.

And first of all, it is clear Mahomet must have been by nature of a profound and reverent disposition, a man not capable of setting questions about the supernatural and man's destiny carelessly aside, or of perfunctorily discharging a few established rites, and going through life with ease: but incessantly gnawed by cravings after knowledge, and bent on problems too high for human solution. Even among the Arabs, surcharged as their temperament is with the tendency toward the ideal and the wonderful, Mahomet must have been a recognized transcendentalist and dreamer. While a Polytheist, his polytheism must have been abject and enthusiastic, a hundred times more vehement than that of his fellows; and from the moment when a germ of doubt was implanted into the midst of his till then implicit faith, his struggles either to extirpate it or force it to its utmost manifestations, must have been resolute and unceasing. This hypothesis of an inordinate earnestness and melancholy in the character of Mahomet from the first, is absolutely inevitable. During the whole pe"Remember when Abraham said unto his fathriod of his mental change, say his Arabic bier and his people, what are these images to ographers, it was his custom frequently to swered, We found our fathers worshiping which ye are so entirely devoted?' They anwithdraw from Mecca, and to live days and them.He said. Verily both ye and your fathnights together in a cave in Mount Hara, ers have been in manifest error.' They said, about nine miles from the town, spending the Dost thou seriously tell us the truth; or art time in prayer and meditation. In this there thou one who jestest with us?' He replied, was, by no means, such eccentricity as would Verily your Lord is the Lord of the heavens and be implied in similar behavior amongst ourthe earth; it is he who hath created them; and selves. The practice of withdrawing into the God, I will surely devise a plot against your idols, I am one of those who bear witness thereof. By solitude of the desert was doubtless common after ye shall have retired from them and shall enough among the devout Arabians, wheth- have turned your backs.' And in the people's er Christian or Pagan, as indeed it is con- absence he went into the temple where the idols genial with Eastern habits and with an East- stood, and he brake them all in pieces, except the ern climate; and probably all that was rebigest of them; that they might lay the blame markable in Mahomet's case, was the extraupon that. And when they were returned and ordinary extent to which he carried the prac-Who hath done this to our gods? He is cersaw the havoc which had been made, they said, tice. The whole month of Ramadhan, which was the holy month of the Arabians, he used to spend in his cave on the mountain, alone

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tainly an impious person.' And certain of them answered, We heard a young man speak reproachfully of them; he is named Abraham.'

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They said, Bring him therefore before the eyes, tural. Thus, (to add another passage corroof the people that they may bear witness against borative of the fact to those already quoted,) him.' And when he was brought before the aswe read, in the 23d chapter of the Koran, sembly, they said unto him, Hast thou done this unto our gods, O Abraham? He answered, these words:"The unbelieving Meccans Nay, that biggest of them hath done it but ask say, as their predecessors said, they say, them if they can speak.' They said, 'Verily When we shall be dead, and shall have bethou knowest that they speak not.' Abraham come dust and bones, shall we really be answered, 'Do ye therefore worship, besides God, raised to life? We have already been that which cannot profit you at all, neither can it threatened with this, and our fathers also, hurt you? Fie on you, and on that which ye heretofore; this is nothing but fables of the worship besides God"--Koran (Sale's Translaancients.' tion,) chap. 21. And again, in the same chapter, the chiefs of the Meccans are made to say, "Doth he (Mahomet) threaten you that after ye shall be dead, and shall become dust and bones, ye shall be brought forth alive from your graves? Away, away, with this that ye are threatened with! There is no other life beside our present life; we die and we live, and we shall not be raised again." Nothing has struck us more in the Koran than these and similar passages. They show, as we have said before, that there has been a vein, if not of literal and articulate Atheism, at least of that Sadduceeism that is akin to it, through all history; that the affirmation of "No data" respecting questions of the supernatural was rife even among the Shemitic Arabs, whose daily language was actually viscid with nouns and adjectives relating to the Deity and his doings; and that this affirmation was deduced, as it usually is, by men who are fond of repeating it, into a justification of practical immorality and license.

At that moment of his life, whenever it was, when Mahomet had fully realized the feeling here described, and experienced the iconoclastic fury rise within him against the gods of the Kaaba, at that moment he had worked himself thoroughly clear of the preponderant element in the anarchy that Arabia then lay under, and placed himself, at least tacitly, on the side of the non-conforming factions. For, taking his stand, as he was obliged to do in this protest against idolatry, on that great Monotheistic principle, which, after all, did slumber vaguely in the minds of even the idolatrous Arabs, as in the minds of all men of the Shemitic race, he necessarily found himself at that moment on the same platform with the Arabic Jews and the Arabic Christians. Affirming the principle which both these sects of his countrymen inscribed so broadly and conspicuously on their respective banners, nay, borrowing their words in his own expressions of it, he could not but feel a sympathy with them of the strongest kind. Accordingly, never, even during his subsequent controversies with them, did he lose his respect for the "people of the book." But Mahomet did not rest in the first stage of his change. It was not decreed that he should be either a Jew or a Christian. For, from that slight and temporary hold which he had taken of the Monotheistic principle in his resolute antagonism to idolatry, a new flood of excitement was to carry him once more away into strange latitudes of unbelief; and although he did at length recover the principle, and cling to it as a standard, it was after such a course of tossing, and in the midst of such new circumstances, that he and Christianity stood forever dissociated.

We have already pointed out that, in conjunction and intermixture with the Idolatry, the corrupt Judaism, and the debased Christianity that possessed the Arabian soil, there existed a large amount of positive and dogmatic Sadduceeism, disbelief of any efficient relation between man and the superna

Now, it is evident, we think, that Mahomet, in his recoil from the idolatry of the mass of his countrymen, reached even this, the negative pole of Arabic opinion,— reached it, at least, by a temporary effort of intellect, so as to be able ever afterward to imagine life as it appeared when projected from that point of view. This we infer from the extraordinary clearness and justness of his delineations of what may be called the Shemitic variety of Atheistic mood. And from the strength and frequency of his references to that mood, from the incessant energy with which he does battle against it, we would infer, also, that it was out of the portal of this virulent Arabian scepticism, more directly and immediately than out of the portal of mere Polytheism and Idolatry, that he issued finally in his character of Prophet. There was a sufficient basis of Monotheistic feelings in the heart of the Koreish itself from which to denounce the absurdities of the Polytheistic worship; but that for which, according to Mahomet's view of the case, all Arabia did not supply a

tinguished it in his own mind, and what a blaze of Theistic enthusiasm he had enkindled there instead, is proved by the incessant iterations throughout the Koran of all forms and modes of the Theistic argument. How strikingly, for example, are the omnipresence of God and His indissoluble intimacy with the world He had made, proclaimed in the following passage:—

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powerful enough antidote, was the inveterate | spirit of Infidelity and Sadduceeism that pervaded all, and lay beneath all. In Polytheistic Arabia then, as in Christian Europe now, the majority of men had absolutely forgotten that God existed. Even that broadest and most naked of all religious beliefs the belief in a supernatural justice, and in some tremendous relation between it and man-had died out and disappeared. Then, as now, men were going about their business, rising in the morning and lying down in the evening, ploughing, building, eating, drinking, performing all the manifold processes and functions of life; yet denying all the while the very existence of the element over which they floated. As the sea is round a ship, so does the supernatural surround the present life; nay, as the very nature and idea of a ship is, that it may move in the sea; so it is only with reference to the unseen and eternal that this life and its arrangements can have any meaning. But then, as now, men had forgotten this. "Let us work and enjoy ourselves while we may; let us conduct ourselves according to the necessities and relations of the life that is:" such, after their special Arabic form of phrase, was the motto of the sceptical Arabs of the days of Mahomet, as it is of many of the teachers of our own generation. O worse than folly! as if, on the principle of navigating only according to the internal necessities of the ship, sailors were to steer with-earth after it hath been dead: verily, herein are out reference to the sea!

How Mahomet discussed this question with himself, and to what extent he may have been indebted for the assurance of his conclusions to the influence of Christian doctrine and phraseology, cannot now be ascertained; it is abundantly clear, however, that he did succeed in attaining to a firm and unalterable conviction in the great truth of Natural Theism-the relation of man to a Supreme and Transcendent Justice. Probably in no Pagan soul that ever lived, was this faith so real, so rampant, as in that of Mahomet. If ever he had acquiesced for a moment in the Sadduceeism of his countrymen, and accepted the cold hypothesis of the absoluteness of the present life, ultimately, at least, he reached a point whence he looked down upon that hypothesis as the most wretched and damnable of human delusions. To assail Sadduceeism, to laugh at it, to trample it under foot, to bruise it out of men, even to kill those that would persist in it,such was the work that Mahomet set to himself. With what completeness he had ex

"Wherefore glorify God when the evening overtaketh you, and when ye rise in the morning; and unto Him be praise in heaven and earth; and at sunset, and when ye rest at noon. He bringeth forth the living out of the dead, and He bringeth forth the dead out of the living; and He quickeneth the earth after it had been dead and in like manner shall ye be brought forth from your graves. Of His signs, one is that He hath created you of dust; and behold, ye are become men spread over the face of the earth. And of His signs another is that He hath created for you out of yourselves wives that ye may live with them, and hath put love and compassion between you: verily, herein are signs unto people who consider. And of His signs are also the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variety of your languages, and of your complexions: verily, herein are signs to men of understanding. And of His signs are your sleeping by night and by day, and your seeking to provide for yourselves of His abundance: verily, herein are signs unto men who hearken. Of His signs others are that He showeth you the lightning to strike terror and to give hope of rain, and that He sendeth down water from heaven, and quickeneth thereby the

signs unto people who understand. And of His signs this also is one, namely, that the heaven and the earth stand firm at His command: hereafter, when He shall call you out of the earth at one summons, behold, ye shall come forth.”— | Koran, (Sale's Translation,) chap. 30.

Such, repeated a thousand times in the Koran, is Mahomet's summary of what he considered the evidence of Islamism. When asked for miracles in proof of his mission, he invariably made this or some similar enumeration of the signs of God in creation— "these were signs to people that could understand." In short, recognizing as existing in his own day one peculiarly Arabic form of the eternal antagonism between belief and unbelief, between the theory of God everywhere and the theory of God nowhere, between the theory of everything miraculous and the theory of nothing miraculous, Mahomet resolutely flung himself into the battle on the side of " the faith." The following

extracts from the Koran will show with what special points of the great Theistic conviction his own soul had learnt to be most familiar,

and what special aspects of that conviction were most proper also, in his opinion, to be flashed, as from a light-house, across the face of Arabia :

We (God) created not the heavens and the earth and that which is between them by way of sport. If We had pleased to take diversion, verily We had taken it in that which beseemeth Us." Koran, (Sale's Translation,) chap. 21.

"Thou shalt be engaged in no business, neither shalt thou be employed in meditating on any passage, nor shall ye do any action, but We will be witnesses over you when ye are employed therein. Nor is so much as the weight of an ant hidden from Thy Lord in earth or heaven; neither is there anything lesser than that or greater but it is written in the perspicuous book."— Ibid., chap. 10. "Dost thou not perceive that God knoweth whatever is in heaven or earth? There is no private discourse among three persons but He is the fourth of them; nor among five, but He is the sixth of them; neither among a smaller number than this nor a larger, but He is with them wheresoever they be and He will declare unto them that which they have done on the day of resurrection, for God knoweth all things."-Ibid., chap. 58.

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brought back unto your Lord.' If thou couldst see when the wicked shall bow down their heads before the Lord, saying, 'O Lord, we have seen and have heard; suffer us, therefore, to return into the world, and we will work that which is right, since we are now certain of the truth of what hath been preached to us'-thou wouldst see an amazing sight.—Ibid., chap. 32.

"When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the wild beasts shall be gathered together; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who had been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death; and when the books shall be laid open; and when the heaven shall be removed; and when hell shall burn fiercely; and when paradise shall be brought near: then every soul shall know what it hath wrought." Ibid., chap. 81.

"Whoso chooseth the tillage of the life to come, unto him will We give increase in his tillage; and whoso chooseth the tillage of this world, We will give him the fruit thereof; but he shall have no part in the life to come."-Ibid., chap. 42.

"If it were not that mankind would have then become one sect of infidels, verily We would have given unto those who believe not in the Merciful roofs of silver to their houses, and stairs of silver by which they might ascend thereto, and doors of silver to their houses, and couches of silver for them to lean on, and ornaments of gold, for all this is the provision of the present life; but the next life with thy Lord shall be for those who fear Him."-Ibid., chap. 43.

These were the fixed ideas in the mind of Mahomet. That there is a God, almighty and just; that all creation and history is but a superficial show or play of matter, resting on an infinite sea of spirit, wherein one day it will be again engulfed; that the present life is but as a little water let down from heaven to be mixed for a while with the

"The present life is no other than a toy and a plaything; but the future mansion of paradise is life indeed. If men knew this they would not prefer the former to the latter."--Ibid., chap. 29. "O men, verily the violence which ye commit against your own souls is for the enjoyment of the present life only; afterward unto Us shall ye return, and We will declare unto you that which ye have done. Verily the likeness of this present life is no other than as water which We send down from heaven, and wherewith the productions of the earth are mixed, of which men eat and cattle also, until the earth receive its vesture, and be adorned with various plants: the inhabitants thereof imagine that they have power over the same; but Our command cometh upon it by night or by day, and We render it as though it had been mown, as though it had not yesterday abounded in fruits. Thus do We explain Our signs unto the people who consider. God inviteth unto the dwelling of peace, and directeth whom He earth; that to regard the tillage of the prepleaseth unto the right way. They who do right sent life only, is, therefore, nothing but madness and infatuation; that God sees and shall receive a most excellent reward and a superabundant addition; neither blackness nor shame registers all that is transacted among men ; shall cover their faces. These shall be the i-and that, on that day when the world and its habitants of paradise; they shall continue therein forever. But they who commit evil shall receive the reward of evil equal thereunto, and they shall be covered with shame, (for they shall have no protector against God,) as though their faces were covered with the profound darkness of the night. These shall be the inhabitants of hell-fire;

they shall remain therein forever."-Ibid.,

chap. 10.

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They say, when we lie down in the earth, shall we be raised thence a new creature ?" yea, they deny the meeting of their Lord at the resurrection. Reply, the angel of death who is set over you, shall cause you to die; then shall ye be

inhabitants shall be summoned back to the great presence whence they issued, justice will be done, and a broad and eternal separation will be struck between believers and infidels-such, in their most abstract and general form, were the conclusions in which the thoughtful Koreishite, the apostate, in his mature age, from the faith of his forefathers, and the antagonist, by the very necessities of his constitution, of the wretched Sadduceeism that alone seemed to compete with that up around faith, at last arrived at, and built